


Announcing your place in the family of things

by blcwriter



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Dreamsharing, Gen, Heavy-handed metaphors, Post Credits Scene Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:15:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25498936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blcwriter/pseuds/blcwriter
Summary: Post-movie Andromache semi-character study, riffing on the post-credit scene reveal-- because I wondered if she'd stopped dreaming of Quynh, and why, and what would happen if she started dreaming about Quynh again.I don't know what it'd take to make Andy take some time to allow herself to feel things for a moment; I do love the idea of Nile giving Andy a loving kick in the pants to get moving again.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 7
Kudos: 81





	Announcing your place in the family of things

She jerked out of the sleep she rarely let herself have, thrown out in panic from dreaming of Quynh—Quynh, who wasn’t drowning under the water, but instead was fountaining rage on dry land. And Quynh had felt it—she’d felt that Andromache was dreaming of her—she’d looked Andromache right in the dream-eye or something (Joe would remember some poet before his time who’d said it the right way) and asked: “Until the end, right?” 

It was a threat or a promise or both—either way, Andromache stumbled out of bed to the trash can and heaved, choking and spitting out nothing but bile. She hadn’t had supper before going to bed, and she’d stopped trying to drink herself into dreamlessness—at least now that drinking too much could actually kill her. Poetic fatalism appealed less now that there were actual consequences attached. Eventually, the dry heaving passed—she uncurled from the floor, grabbed the trash can and carried it with her as she made her way out to the back of the house.

The can thunked into the rubbish bins she tossed it toward—Andromache threw herself into the swing at the edge of the porch, the wooden frame complaining at her violent movement. 

“She’s pissed,” Nile remarked, settling more gently beside her. In one hand, she held a bottle of water. In the other, she offered the bottle of Slivovitz Joe’d doctored with the blackberries hedging in one side of the farm being reclaimed by the forest where they’d holed up for a while. 

Nominally, the excuse was that Andy needed time to heal the old-fashioned way. Practically speaking, Copley needed a headstart on erasing them from the virtual history books. More practically speaking, and unsaid but understood by the three people with more than five hundred years of life under their belts, they needed to hole up someplace far enough away from Nile’s hometown that the rest of them would have time to catch up with her before she tried to see her family one last time, and ruined the next ten years of her life wracked by guilt and resentment. 

Instead of responding, Andromache gargled and spat out the water, repeated, then splashed the rest on her face and the back of her neck—washing off the sour, cold sweat. That done, she took a few deep breaths as she stared up at the Bear, overhead. 

“Don’t the Greeks call that Callisto?” 

“The Romans, who butchered the myth, but yes. The Greeks called everything after some other woman done wrong by the gods,” she spat, because no matter where you were in history, it was almost always some poor woman’s fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—whether they were minding their own business or actively trying to help. “We used to leave bears’ heads in trees facing the stars so that they’d find their way home.” 

Nile took a swig of the Slivovitz for herself, hissed at the burn, then laughed as Andromache took the bottle from her and gulped down enough to make her eyes water for some other reason than fear. Or grief. Or rage that she could barely admit she felt toward Quynh-- because Andromache had looked, whether Quynh believed it or not, or whether Joe or Nicky paid any attention to what she did and where she went when she took a few years away every few decades or so. She didn’t blame Joe and Nicky—she didn’t—for believing her lies when she called off the search after the first fifty years. 

They’d all been heartbroken, but Nicky and Joe had still been so young, and she couldn’t stand the idea back then of watching them wonder and agonize, day after day for another half-century if that would be them, some time in the future. Better to let them think she’d agreed that because it was hopeless, she wasn’t going to look any more. Better to continue the search on her own-- gods knew she’d had enough practice once she’d learned that the dreams meant something, that if she woke and followed the pull inside her chest, she’d find the woman she’d dreamt of.

Too bad the pull and depth of the ocean and the chokes and stuttering of Quynh’s constant drowning made it impossible to follow her heart.

“I’ve spent my fair share of time drowning while looking for her,” she admitted aloud. “But guilt’s not as much of an anchor as a lead coffin, I guess.”

Nile knocked her head against Andromache’s shoulder. “You looked for her, but you’re not a god, even when people had more reason to think so.”

“I had time, though, and I didn’t spend all of it looking.” 

She couldn’t. As much as she still dreamt of Quynh’s rage and despair, her own had choked her enough that she couldn’t manage everyone’s grief, plus her own, at the same time. It had been almost enough, most of the time; keep Nicky and Joe going, make sure they were okay, find and train Booker, then do the kinds of things only they all could do— throw themselves into the hopeless side of a fight until their deaths and rebirths and deaths and rebirths and the things that they’d learned to use in a fight in between deaths added up to something that pushed the despair back a bit. She needed some kind of memory of doing something for someone besides just herself-- because Quynh was the other part of her soul. Saving Quynh was selfish as breathing, and wasn’t that fucking ironic? Another gulp of the Slivovitz didn’t help her think more clearly about it. Taking care of their family required her to not spend all her time literally drowning in pity. 

Nile scootched closer, and tugged the mothball-smelling quilt around until it was over both of their shoulders. “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles in the desert, repenting.” She took back the bottle and grimaced even as she swallowed some more. “It’s ok just to live, sometimes.” 

She kept telling herself Nile was so young, but that wasn’t entirely true—it only took dying two or three times to imagine how old you could get. “That sounds like something Nicky would say. Are you going to give him a run for his money, quoting scripture at me?”

Nile smiled and knocked shoulders with her again, warmth leaching into Andromache’s side. “It’s not scripture,” she snorted. “Just permission to not have to fix everything all of the time.” Twisting, she turned to look Andromache head-on. “She’s got a right to have wanted to have someone save her,” she said, firmly. Just as firmly, then, she went on. “But you’ve got a right to save yourself sometimes, too.”

That—well. That truth felt a little bit like the first time she’d been thrown from a horse, after whipping the poor thing too hard in her anxiety to get where she’d been going.

“This wasn’t quite my part of the world,” she finally offered after another slug of the brandy let her blink back more straightforward tears. “Close enough, though.” Minsk was only a few days’ drive from here, even if they took it slow through forests that were older than she was. There weren’t a lot of living things older than here anymore, but this western edge of her first forest was enough to make her feel both old and young- small- again.

“Yeah?” Nile asked, allowing the change of subject. “You gonna show me how to hunt bears and hang heads in trees?” 

“And how to forage mushrooms that won’t kill you, navigate by the stars, speak all the major Slavic languages, ride a horse, and make a decent pirozhki.”

Nile grinned. “Only if you promise to try deep dish at some point.” Still grinning, she unfolded herself from the swing, hauled Andromache up to her feet, and steered them both back into the house. 

The bedsprings groaned and creaked like a goose when she crawled back into bed, but Nile’s order that she “budge over, Mama Bear, and make room for baby,” was easy to follow, and the mothball-smelling quilt over them both and Nile’s steady breathing into the back of her neck felt like a new kind of family she might not have to lead all by herself.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and quote from Mary Oliver's [ Wild Geese. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE)
> 
> I like to think Andy remembers more than she lets on and is a silently nostalgic proto-Slav, and that she's got hidey-holes all over Eastern Europe and the former USSR, including the [ Białowieża Forest. ](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/33/) You can't go home again, but you can build something close enough to count.
> 
> (Also, I think it's telling that Andy introduces herself as Andromache the Scythian when she meets Nile. She may understand the point of nicknames, as well as about using the names people choose for themselves, but how she thinks of herself in her own head can be different than how the rest of the world knows her.)


End file.
